No.146 Asides

🎥 Conference by CIVIC SQUARE a couple of months ago, videos of the talks and panels are now going up: Department of Dreams. “Bold new regenerative futures that weave together the dreams of many. Department of Dreams is a site for unlocking, sharing, manifesting and investing into the dream capacity that lies inside us all.”
📡 I haven’t dug into this Ford Foundation project yet but it looks quite good. Creative Futures. “a reimagining of the fields of arts and culture, documentary film, and journalism, a set of concrete action plans to fuel and shape the transformative possibilities to come. In the words of abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” Here are some of those fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.”
🔥 🧵 by zeynep tufekci on the lessons not learned by the media. In 2016, I explained how media’s inability to resist mindlessly participating in sabotage purposefully dangled in front of them—instead of doing their job—was, in effect, a form of censorship for the 21st century. The “stars” have barely learned a thing.
Very good 🧵 by Chris Herd on WFH and the new office space reality. HQ’s are finished: companies will cut their commercial office space by 40-60%. The will allow every worker to work from home 2-4 days a week, and come into the office 1-2 days a week
🗺 🤩 🇬🇧 King’s Topographical Collection. “The Topographical Collection of George III contains drawn and printed maps, views and atlases produced between 1500 and 1824.”
🤯 🧵 by QC about the Drake equation. it’s ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually.
🇨🇺 The life and death of SNET, Havana’s alternative internet. “At its peak, user estimates hovered around 100,000 IP addresses. Isolated from the internet and beyond the government’s control, young Cubans set their own terms on forums, social media platforms, and local websites. During the network’s decade-long golden era, it offered a rare example of citizen and community exchange in a country where the state carefully controls communication, until the state finally took it over.”
🇸🇪 Ikea to buy back used furniture in recycling push. “The Swedish giant will next month launch a scheme to buy back your unwanted Billy bookcases, and certain other of its furniture items you no longer need or want. Under the plan, it will offer vouchers worth up to 50% of the original price, to be spent at its stores.”
🤔 🇺🇸 IBM to split into two companies by end of 2021. “spinning off some of its lower-margin lines of business into a new company and focusing on higher-margin cloud [and AI] services.”